Journal Entry #7

1. The hypothesis that the author tries to explore is to be able to understand the revision process. This means they used six editors to analyze how they go about revising papers. It was found that they rate author's levels by knowledge, and the strategies used by editors to detect problems in works. This brought Bisaillon a way to develop more research on the topic of professional editing. 2. To collect their information, they first put the six editors into two groups: one for experts and one for less experienced professional editors. They did this to see if experience changed how the behavior of the editors. They were also split into two different categories about how they believed revision should go. These were the "normative" and "communicational" groups. Normative means that the editor looks for grammatical, spelling, and typographical errors while communicational means that the editor attends to how the work sounds if it were spoken. Then they create artificial texts with planned errors. Once the participants (editors) revise the work the researchers study what they chose to fix. They used "retrospective verbalization" with the editors to understand why they fixed what they did. They used this method because it does not interfere with what they revised because it was already done. During the entire experiment, the editors were filmed and this was used to help see how they acted while revising. Also, the researchers used an unedited and the edited copies to compare them. Finally, they analyzed the retrospective verbalization the editors gave in the end. By using the work of other researchers, they could clarify the parts of the revision process. 3. Professional editing differs from student revision in that editors minimally look back and mostly work forward, like the text was meant to be read. Also, professional editors put more time and effort into their work than students do. One big difference is that the editor is paid by the writer and the editor can get to know the writer and his/her tendencies. In the classroom, students may not know how other students write or the meaning the writer is trying to get across. Also, students should know basically what the others are writing about in most situations, while the editor needs to be let known the meaning of the work.